(Animation, etc)

Bits from Deep Winter.

Ah, January, with your sobriety and need for useful activity. I suppose we better do you.

I have a list of overlong posts to make, I got backed up a little with various things happening towards the end of the year, I’ll make it easy for myself by starting with a Round Up Of Things type post.

WolfandFox posted this clip from Judex. We got shown this film at art college and it had a profound effect on me. This sequence stood apart somewhat, it’s like film from another planet, doesn’t try to explain itself too much. I like that.

This clip from Paul Mason, an off the cuff rant on his frustration with another banking corruption story, from someone who follows world finance as closely as he does. It won’t stop happening, despite what they say.

I spent a bit of time in South Shields during November. It’s a lovely place.

Social media offer a single profile for our singular identity, but our consciousness comprises multiple forms of identity simultaneously: We are at once a unique bundle of sense impressions and memories, and a social individual imbued with a collectively constructed sense of value and possibility. Things like Facebook give the impression that these different, contestable and often contradictory identities (and their different contexts) can be conveniently flattened out, with users suddenly having more control and autonomy in their piloting through everyday life. That is not only what for-profit companies like Facebook want, but it is also what will feel natural to subjects already accustomed to capitalist values of convenience, capitalist imperatives for efficiency, and so on.

The magnificent Billie Whitelaw past away, Samuel Becket’s Perfect Actress. How can you not watch this and be transported to another place. (#FilmFromAnotherPlanet)

Bill Kartalopoulos wrote a great piece on why comics are more important now than ever, in which he refers to Professor Maryanne Wolf‘s idea of the bi-literate brain. It includes an interesting breakdown of this classic page by Windsor McCay.

via Huff Post

“Robert Frost famously described poetry as the thing that gets lost in translation. It’s not hard to imagine the story of Little Nemo’s galloping bed adapted into full blazing CGI, and certainly much would be added. Digital texture artists would show us what kind of wood Nemo’s bed is made from (oak? teak? cherry wood?); the wind would ruffle convincingly through Nemo’s hair as his face registered every gradation of delight and terror (the recent cgi Peanuts trailer suggests some possibilities). But what would be lost in this translation from one form to another would be the poetics of comics: the aesthetic experience of simultaneously experiencing a comic’s form and content so harmoniously that the contours of the comic’s theme can be read in its architectural blueprint.” (via)

Matt Fraction wrote this about why he is easing off Twitter. It’s a sobering read. Encourages me to want to post on here more.

I have been keeping a Winter 2014 playlist. It’s already quite long as I feel I have been catching up with autumn. (There’s a more comprehensive version on Whyd, but that doesn’t seem to embed here.)

All thru the gateway now, yes? Happy New Year, Planet Earth! Arbitrary time for restarts but goodness knows a few of us could do with one. x